"If it's a penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, someone's making a penny." -- Steven Wright

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

It's Injection Time Again

One of my biggest objections with those on the right is their raw support for capital punishment (not all).

It seems to me that the the wrong focus, recently, was pressed upon the Supreme Court for review. I agree with John Holdridge, director of the A.C.L.U. Capital Punishment Project. It is not the method of execution that should have been reviewed, but the issue of “poor people getting lousy lawyers.”

Let me add, prosecutors whose zeal overwhelms their ability to discern right from wrong should be removed from their posts immediately. Witness the case below.

The court-appointed trial lawyers for Mr. Hoffman, convicted of killing a jewelry store owner during a robbery, were not told that the main witness against him had been paid for his cooperation and was given immunity from prosecution and a reduced sentence for bank robbery. Mr. Cheshire said that a copy of the district attorney’s notes was altered to conceal those facts before they were provided to the defense for discovery. Mr. Hoffman was released in December.

(...)

The man who prosecuted Mr. Jones, however, does not concede that the defendant was innocent. The prosecutor, G. Dewey Hudson, said that he still believed that Mr. Jones was involved in the murder, but that he could not retry him because crucial witnesses had died and one had recanted. “It has taken 15 years for the court system to make the determination that Mr. Jones’s original counsel was ineffective,” Mr. Hudson said in a statement released Friday. “As a result of this delay, the State has been severely handcuffed in its obligation to prosecute Mr. Jones for the murder of Leamon Grady.”Handcuffed in its obligation to prosecute? I thought Mr. Jones was already prosecuted successfully. What Hudson really means is the state was handcuffed in its obligation to “execute.”

So much for the Constitution and the right to a fair trial. Come to think of it, be very frightened because the state of Wisconsin just elected a judge who thinks much like Mr. Hudson.